Data Migration

June 08, 2017

Recently I was asked to source some data for a client, and after engaging the main data suppliers, I chose a vendor I trusted. I’ve purchased data many times, so I wasn’t expecting this result. Well you can imagine I wasn’t too happy to find over 60% of the contacts supplied where no longer at their stated organisations. Now 60% is very high. With B2B data degrading at 10-22% per annum depending on which industry, I was expecting 1 in 10 or at worst case 1 in 5 contacts to be out of date (the latter case is what I...
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February 02, 2017

I don’t know about you, but when I receive a lengthy business report I always have a feeling of ‘oh no!’ I’ll admit it, I love looking at charts and diagrams…I feel I can see the right questions to ask immediately…what the chart shows and what the chart doesn’t show. I can then decide to read the report or seek answers elsewhere. When you’re busy, this has to be the best way to see information. “A picture is worth a thousand words” is never truer when analysing data quality results. In this first of 3 posts, I’m going to briefly...
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January 26, 2017

My nephew’s thinking of a career in sales. While researching on the internet he came across the infamous sales movie Glengarry Glen Ross starring Al Pacino, Jack Lemmon and Alec Baldwin. For all sales people out there, this is just ones of those movies you watch, whether you agree with the contents or not, but for some young sales people, the testosterone driven environment is really encouraging. One of the most famous scenes is where Blake (Alec Baldwin) is sent from the parent company to motivate an underperforming sales team by unleashing a torrent of verbal abuse. In that scene...
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November 17, 2016

“There is real magic in enthusiasm. It spells the difference between mediocrity and accomplishment” – Norman Vincent Peale For me this quote sums up why some companies have good data and why others have poor data. It’s their enthusiasm about data. When you’re not so enthusiastic about your data, then it’s likely your data will be mediocre or of poor quality, but if you’re enthusiastic about data then I’ll bet you have good quality data. So here are 5 suggestions that will move you from mediocrity to excellence: Having an Evangelist If you may have the overall responsibility for your...
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October 28, 2016

Have you been through that experience where you procrastinated or had a fear about something, only then to overcome it and think to yourself ‘that was a lot easier than I thought and what took me so long to overcome it’. You then realise it’s all in your head. So you may be wondering how one can have a fear of cleaning data…it’s only data after all, but no need to mock it…you’ll be surprised how often this happens. Fear happens when you see a threat from danger, pain or harm. In our context, it’s the pain that triggers this...
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September 23, 2016

Do you remember the time when you decorated a room or a house, and after many days of toil you looked at the final product only to see bits of your new wall not painted, or the paint on the skirting has edged over to the wall, and so on, and you keep on spotting tiny errors here and there. You then go through the process of tidying this up, and if you’re like me, you’re wondering how you missed all this, I was always sure I worked thoroughly. We’ll, we are only humans, and we are going to miss...
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September 15, 2016

This is got to be one of the most frustrating aspects of helping companies achieve exceptional data quality; it’s the CRM’s inability to import cleansed data easily. For the larger CRM systems the task of re-importing cleansed data is not too onerous, but merging duplicate data can be a real challenge. Now it’s understandable that merging two entities in a CRM application is complicated, here are two good reasons why: (a) Because of all the linked information. For example, an account may have contacts, opportunities, orders, activities, tasks, etc. attached to it, so all of these have to be merged...
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January 26, 2016

‘It would be really, really nice if all our clients’ data were in a similar format and of similar quality, then we could write simple automated routines to create excellent levels of data quality and not have to work too much.’ We’ll, I can keep on dreaming all I want, but the harsh reality is that data comes in as many variations as there are clients. This is not that surprising as data has its own personality primarily driven by the characteristics of the company or people managing it. (See a previous post on Data Personality to explain why.) If...
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January 19, 2016

A few years ago I came across a story about a data migration for a new CRM application that can be classified in the ‘Oops’ category. The company in question had a rather large CRM application being deployed over several sites and hundreds of users. The responsibility fell with the IT team to make it happen smoothly. The IT team had a good reputation for project implementation and undertook all the necessary steps for a successful roll-out, apart from this one mistake. On go-live day, the system worked flawlessly, all users were trained with additional video training available via the...
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July 06, 2015

Recently, I attended a sales meeting with someone who didn’t get data quality. For some reason the topic seemed too bothersome or just not relevant to them. In this case, it was relevant to this person because they were responsible for the company’s data quality; admittedly it was their primary responsibility. I was surprised to hear them say that formatting name information didn’t matter much as their mailings got to the right people. He had been cleaning addresses, so the mailings were being delivered to the correct destination, but he was taking a risk in the name not being correctly...
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